


Unnatural Influence

by Kizmet



Series: Prelude: Ultron Speculation [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gap Filler, Gen, Mind Manipulation, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-11 17:46:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13529394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kizmet/pseuds/Kizmet
Summary: James Rhodes tries to figure out when he stopped having concerns about teaming up with a former HYDRA volunteer.





	Unnatural Influence

**Author's Note:**

> An attempt to bridge the gap between the way I've written Rhodey post-AoU and his period of membership in the Avengers.

After it comes out that Wanda had been using her powers, abet unconsciously, to influence the Avengers Rhodey will spend years trying to pinpoint the moment when it happened to him. When the Witch got into his head and messed with his emotions to make it seem like a good idea to be on a team with a former HYDRA volunteer who’d done nothing more than say ‘Whoops, I made a mistake,’ by way of atonement. 

The scary part is he can’t do it. 

Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes was a man who knew his own mind. Sure there were things that had changed so gradually and naturally that he couldn’t pinpoint the moment when the change occurred; he couldn’t remember when Tony Stark stopped being just his best friend and became his brother in all but blood. But he could recall the exact moment when he went from having a class with the Stark Industries’ heir to having a class with Tony Stark. 

James Rhodes had never been someone to change his mind without a reason. He knows his opinion of Wanda- and the Avengers, the two were so intertwined- had changed but he can’t think why. All he can do is remember moments when he knew his opinion even if it seemed to change from one moment to the next, without any input from him. 

**Moment One**

Rhodey watched the new Avengers Compound growing nearer without much enthusiasm. The battle of Sokovia and its aftermath hadn’t left him with a good feel about Tony’s team. _‘No, it’s more than that. Everything I’ve seen about how the Avengers function makes me uncomfortable.’_

Pepper’s after-action review of the Ultron situation had brought a lot of things into focus for Rhodey: The way Steve Rogers had only been interested in assigning blame rather than wanting to understand what had gone wrong. The way Tony’s team had been so quick to rally around the Maximoff girl at Tony’s expense, forgetting that she’d volunteered for HYDRA, aided Ultron and sought the Avengers’ destruction practically overnight... The way Thor assaulting Tony had been treated as so unremarkable that even Rhodey himself hadn’t questioned what was happening right in front of him until Pepper had put it in perspective. 

It was an understatement to say that Rhodey wasn’t exactly thrilled about reporting for training with the team but Tony was worried about leaving them short-handed and he’d brought up some good points. 

Rhodey had complete faith that Pepper and Tony would be successful in controlling the narrative about Ultron. Sure Tony had been a little, a lot, too eager to throw himself on his sword at first but with Pepper’s help he was thinking now. Given Tony’s -entirely reasonable- concern about a second alien invasion his determination to keep the Avengers from bogging down in questions about Ultron made sense. The Avengers wouldn’t be enough in the event of a full fledged invasion but they were the core around which a resistance could be built. Rhodey would have liked to throw Maximoff to the wolves or at least see her behind the defendant’s table taking responsibility for her affiliation with both HYDRA and Ultron but Tony wanted the world’s governments focused on why he had believed that something like Ultron was necessary. 

Beyond that, the last thing Tony wanted was to contribute to the growing paranoia around the biologically Enhanced. And Rhodey had to admit that drawing global attention to the Maximoff twins’ poor life choices had the potential to rebound unfairly on an entire community, one they were going to need if Tony was right about what was coming. Still, even if Tony’s logic was convincing, Rhodey suspected that Tony was taking a little too much personal ownership of the twins’ tragedy.

**Moment Two**

“We call this maneuver ‘high ground’,” Captain Rogers said. 

Rhodey watched the recording, clearly taken from Iron Man’s HUD. Tony was hovering in the air about twenty feet up. Below him Romanoff and Barton sprinted toward the Captain keeping about ten feet between them. Rogers planted himself, his shield angled slightly toward Tony. Romanoff leapt into the air and, using the shield as a trampoline, launched herself at Tony. The camera wobbled slightly as Tony caught her hand, “Allez hop!” Tony laughed as he pulled her up. Romanoff planted her feet on his thigh and flung herself back into the air. A moment later Barton repeated the stunt. 

Tony let Barton’s momentum push him down a few feet as Rogers preformed a standing leap. He caught Iron Man’s ankle then hauled himself up until he was holding onto the armor’s shoulders, standing on top of his feet. “Seat belt’s buckled?” Tony asked then he hit the respulors, blasting them into the sky while trusting Rogers’ enhanced strength to keep him in place. A moment later the super soldier leapt clear and the two of them landed on a thirty foot roof alongside Barton and Romanoff. The whole thing had taken less than forty seconds, getting the three grounded Avengers up and over with only one flier to aid them. 

“Thor and the Hulk could get themselves up but their methods of vertical accent weren’t exactly passenger friendly,” Steve explained. “With three actual fliers on the roster we’ll generally just pick a partner and you’ll ferry us ground bound up but this exercise teaches us a lot about each other’s capabilities and it’s good to have a fall back if we get separated or if we need the extra fliers to provide cover.” 

_‘A high voltage trust fall,’_ Rhodes thought privately. _‘Can’t say it doesn’t look fun.’_

Rogers grinned, “Since we have three fliers, we should be making fifty feet easily. It just so happens that the roof of the compound is fifty-three feet and I expect a flier to be there once I sprint across the roof and jump off. You guys up to it?”

_‘Called it.’_

The exercise ended up being quite a bit of fun. It had been awhile since Rhodey had really felt like a member of a unit, ever since the military first realized that the Mark II might as well have been a rock for any pilot except for one James Rhodes. _‘Should have realized something was serious wrong right then, the moment that I realized he let me steal the armor. Still, he could have told me something. That party was practically a repeat of the drunk driving incident in college, only with firearms involved. There’s no way he didn’t know he was pushing my buttons.’_

“Wanda, you’re using your powers to give you a boost,” Rogers noted after the first run through. “Think you can use them to get yourself up?”

“I- I have never tried to use my abilities to lift myself,” Maximoff said with uncertainty.

“Why don’t we have Vision spot you the first time,” Rogers suggested smiling kindly at the girl. “You trust him to catch you if you fall, don’t you?”

Maximoff stole a shy glance at the Synthoid with J.A.R.V.I.S.’s voice. “Of course I trust him,” she said quickly. A light blush coloring her cheeks. _‘Sickeningly cute,’_ Rhodes thought to himself. _‘Still, I’m not sure puppy-love has any place on a special forces team like this one.’_

After the practice session ended Steve invited Rhodey to stick around for a team dinner. It didn’t take him long to gravitate towards Sam Wilson given their shared Air Force background. Then somehow, Rhodes found himself on dishes duty along with the Captain. “I was hoping to get a chance to get to know you,” Rogers said. “Beyond knowing you’re Tony’s friend.”

Rhodey chuckled, “I resigned myself to being known to the world as ‘Tony Stark’s friend’ before that first year of grad school was half finished. But we should sit down and talk. There’s a hard limit on the sorts of missions I can provide support on.”

“Stark keeps you on a short leash,” Maximoff remarked hatefully as she brought her plate in.

Rhodey rolled his eyes, “The US military actually. Tony gets involved in something like Johannesburg and people start asking whether they should be suing SI or him personally… Well, until it hits them that applying to the Maria Stark Relief Fund is a faster, easier and more sure way of getting Tony to pay for the damages.”

“For material losses perhaps,” Wanda muttered under her breath.

“A Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Armed Forces, like myself, gets in the same situation and it’s an act of war,” Rhodes continued frowning severely at her. “Tony’s always trusted my judgement about the suit, even when I didn’t trust him.”

**Moment Three**

“We could have used you on that HYDRA raid last week,” Steve commented as he grabbed a Doombot and smashed it against the New York pavement.

“The country was in the middle of one of their first democratic elections,” Rhodey said. He fired off a round of missiles forcing a group of the green caped robots closer to the ground for his teammates’ convenience. 

“What does that have to do with going after HYDRA? If anything-“ Steve broke off sharply. “Falcon, the Witch needs cover!”

 _‘She’s lost awareness again,’_ Rhodey thought as he watched Sam dive in at the last moment to take down the unfriendly with sights on Wanda. _‘We really should have her working more on that. She’s powerful but there’s no such thing as ideal conditions on a battlefield... Still she’s come a long ways in a short time. And in spite of everything she’s been through in her life.’_

“If anything, we were helping,” Steve resumed. “Who knows what HYDRA might have been doing to influence an election like that.”

“US Military personnel in the next country over were being restricted to base to avoid the slightest impression that the US was attempting to influence the outcome.” Rhodey felt a niggling discomfort that he was having to explain this.

“Politics,” Sam groaned. “We all know there was all sorts of intimidation tactics going on to control who actually made it to the polls but if we try to help we’re the ones accused of voter tampering.”

“Iron Man was never subject to that kind of limit,” Natasha complained.

“Tony thoroughly disassociated himself from the US military,” Rhodey sighed. “You’re lucky I’ve got as much leeway as I do. I wouldn’t if I hadn’t been regularly on loan to UN since 2010 and if we hadn’t couched my association with the Avengers as an effort at bettering working relations between your team and conventional peacekeeping forces.”

“That’s Stark for you, always twisting reality to suit himself,” Wanda sneered. 

Rhodey opened his mouth to protest that it had been he and Pepper who’d come up with the strategy when Steve declared, “You- We’re ALL here to make the world better. We shouldn’t have to kowtow to some politician’s ego to get leave to do what’s right,” in full Captain America knows best voice. 

He let it go. It felt nice to have his efforts to do the right thing recognized. _'There isn’t much point, getting on Wanda’s case about being unfair to Tony. She’s given up going after him. Demanding that people appreciate Tony’s good points when he makes an art-form out of being an asshole has always been a futile endeavor. It’s not like Tony’s thin skinned, or here to care what she thinks of him.’_

**Moment Four**

It was hard when Rhodey showed up at the Compound to find the team, his team sporting bruises and bandages from a mission he’d known nothing about. Worse when the bandages weren’t even applied yet.

The quinjet was just extending it’s ramp when Rhodey flew in for a scheduled team training. “Sorry for wasting your time, Colonel,” Steve said as he walked down the ramp with the Falcon wings over one shoulder, Sam leaning heavily on the other. One of the wings was still half extended, too damaged to retract and Sam’s glassy-eyed expression spoke of a concussion. 

Nat and Wanda trailed after them keeping each other upright. Natasha looked ready to drop from exhaustion and Wanda was keeping her weight off her right leg. Rhodey hurried over and offered Wanda his arm. “Don’t touch me with that thing!” she shrieked glaring at the War Machine armor.

“Come on man,” Sam sighed. “Show a little tact. You know how she is about Stark’s weapons.”

Rhodey backed off, _‘I can’t believe I jumped down Tony’s throat when he decided to stop making weapons. Going into combat, or worse yet sending guys under my command into combat relying on Hammertech or some similar piece of crap is the stuff of nightmares but Tony was doing a horrible thing, making weapons.’_ Rhodes put a hand to his temple, there was something, something intrinsically wrong he couldn’t put his finger on it but he knew how he felt. 

Vision hurried out of the compound. “I was given to believe that this mission was too minor to involved the whole team?” he said sounding distressed as he went to offer Wanda support. She smiled as he picked her up bridal style to get her weight off her bad leg. 

A short while later Rhodey was standing in the hall outside the medical bay keeping out of the way while the team got checked over. “Could you take the wings to Tony for repairs?” Steve asked when the doctors shooed him out with orders to feed his Enhanced metabolism. “And if he had anything we could use to give us a little more aerial support when you and Vision aren’t available that would be great.”

“I’ll ask,” Rhodes said. “Why don’t I come to the after-action review. I’ll be able to give Tony a better idea of what you need if I know what went wrong. We need to make sure we’ve got the right precautions in place to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”

“No one has 20/20 foresight. Sitting around attempting to predict everything would only paralyze us. Then no one would get saved,” Steve replied sternly, only to have what Tony had dubbed his ‘Captain America is disappointed in you’ voice interrupted by his rumbling stomach. 

Rhodey laughed, “Take care of that why don’t you, before the doctors get on my case about keeping you.” 

Maria Hill walked up as Steve walked away, “Do you know what the mission objective was?” she asked.

“I-” Rhodey broke off and shook his head. 

Hill glanced through the open door and saw Vision fussing over Wanda. “They are disturbingly cute,” she said with a frown. 

“Kids in love, what can you do,” Rhodes agreed. 

**Moment Zero**

“Ultron will destroy the world. We cannot standby and do nothing!” Wanda cried.

Pietro grimaced, “What can we do? Go to the Avengers? Fight alongside them?”

“Yes!” Wanda exclaimed. “You didn’t see what I saw, he will destroy everything. The Avengers won’t be enough.” 

“They won’t listen to us. They’ll never trust us,” Pietro said, not exactly disagreeing. “Why would they?”

“I will not be a helpless child, crying while the bombs fall. Not again.”

Pietro thought for a moment. “We only really need to convince Steve Rogers,” he said thinking of the files HYDRA had supplied them with, information gleaned from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s databases about the people who made up the Avengers. “The rest will fall in line. Well, perhaps not Stark but he does not matter. S.H.I.E.L.D. has already done the groundwork to ensure that he would receive no support from his team should he ever go against their Captain’s wishes. Still, there is no guarantee.” 

“We’ll make him listen to us,” Wanda declared. “Make them trust us.”

Pietro gave a little shrug, “Well, I suppose trying cannot hurt.” 

After they’d won the Captain’s trust with their efforts to save the train in Seoul, when he listened to her warning about Tony Stark, Wanda knew Pietro was right. _‘As long as the Avengers’ Captain trusts us and they trust him everything will be alright.'_ Red sparks glittered in the depths of her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I'm not sure if this works or not. I'm trying to show Wanda's power working on the team, on Rhodes specifically, with no one directly observing it happening.


End file.
